Sharing about issues related to Booting from SD card and thumb drive

[ductm208]

Hi devmfc and community,

Firstly, I want to use the first sentences to express my appreciation to the team. You are making such efficient and elegant works. Despite some difficulties from making the sdcard from images (which I am sharing now) I can manage to install the Homeassistant on my tvbox to control the IOT devices. Your packages are light weighted but still encapsulate all mini computers need. Comparing 100MB package with 1GB from other armbian ones you are really rock!

So this is my 7-day configuration which is working smoothly:

• Tanix W2 - S905W2: RAM 4GB
• SD card Yoosee 32GB - SDHC U3 - bought last 2 years
• Release: Devmfc_Debian-Bookworm_6.6.23-meson64_Minimal-24.03.29.img.xz

I also managed to make system boots with:

• JVJ SDHC Class 6 4GB - bought last year
• Kingston 4GB black thumb drive - bought 10 years back
• No name blue thumb drive 8GB partner gave me last 8 years.

But it wont boot with:

• SanDisk SDHC class 10: 32GB - just last week
• Toshiba XDHC U3: 64GB - bought 5 years
• Lexar 32GB thumb drive - just last week

Here are the accessories: Non functional devices are on the right side.

It seems to be kernel issue, it does not support modern storage type. In my observation, this kernel only runs on SDHC class 6 and below. My Yoosee SDHC U3 works but Toshiba XDHC U3 wont regardless they are same size.

This is what I got from HDMI output from non-functional sd cards:

And also from Lexar thumb drive:

Hope my experiments could help someone, and it would be great if you share what you have faced recently. I am happy with SDHC U3, however better speed should be better experience.

Thanks again for your work devmfc

[gitisgreat2023]

Why don't you install to the internal flash drive?
What does free -h show on the 4GB RAM system?
And the first line of
cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:

[ductm208]

I was saying using sdcards is more convenient as I am doing multiple experiments, different setups could be maintained and deployed easily as just plug and play. Installing on emmc I have to erase all stuffs and starting over.

Afaik, to claim back GPU memory reservation dtb need to be compiled again from dtc.

[gitisgreat2023]

Yeah, okay, I install and then run the system. With the experimenting its clear why.
"dtb need to be compiled again from dtc" -> what is dtc?

[devmfc]

@ductm208 Thanks for your feedback.

IMHO sd-cards are a pain in the A...
I think it is not only hardware, but also the combination of the mainline mmc driver + experimental S4 + wring value in my DTB's...

I always use USB flash disks with Amlogic SoC's, never SD-Cards to experiment.

[ductm208]

dtc is the compiler to make dtb, which describes the hardware specs (CPU, ram, clock speeds and peripherals...) to let kernel knows how it could warm up

[ductm208]

Yeah I agree Amlogic does not support very well sdcards. I have a thumb-sized board from Luckfox which soldered Rockchip RV1103 on (link as below) but it could boot with any sd cards I have above.

https://www.luckfox.com/EN-Luckfox-Pico-Plus